1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a linking information making apparatus and a recording medium and in particular, to a linking information making apparatus and a recording medium suitably applied to a work flow system that converts paper documents to electronic formats to construct a workflow.
2. Description of the Related Art
Workflow systems have been proposed in which scanners, facsimile machines, copiers, multifunction machines combining the functions of each these devices, personal computers, mail servers and the like are connected to each other by means of a network to thereby share paper documents and electronic information between workers. Particularly in office environments, conversion of paper documents to electronic formats and improvements in efficiency due to the introduction of a workflow system are desired.
On the other hand, in many cases, a workflow system is developed by converting an existing work system based on paper to electronic formats as is, on the assumption that workflows commonly used in the office such as obtaining approval or passing around circulars would be realized. For this reason, after the workflow system is developed, it is difficult to change the workflow and to further customize the workflow system so as to meet specific conditions.
Thus, when the workflow needs to be changed or a new service needs to be added to the workflow, such a fixed workflow system involves approximately the same amount of expense and development time as when developing a new workflow system.
Further, when a portion of service processing devices supplying services on the workflow system breaks down, the whole system becomes unusable. Thus, it becomes necessary for a system engineer or a system manager to restructure the system by replacing the broken service processing device with another service processing device.
Moreover, in recent years, technologies for providing web applications, which are web-based services existing on a network, in a linked manner have been proposed. There is a desired to reduce development costs by using these web applications as a portion of services of the workflow as required and providing them as services on demand.
In this respect, technologies which express functions graphically by using graphical symbols that are symbol information including icons, figures, letters and easily develop programs by visually combining the graphical symbols are well known (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open (JP-A) Nos. 9-223001, 7-56725, 7-191840, and 6-12250).
However, in the technologies of the related art for developing programs by using the aforementioned graphical symbols, the functions expressed by the graphical symbols are intended for only fixed functions previously defined in a system development environment. In other words, the technologies of the related art present a problem in that services (functions) constituting the workflow system cannot be readily added or changed.